Electronic – Chassis punches for IEC C13 sockets

chassispowersocket

I can't believe I'm having trouble finding chassis punches for the IEC C13 socket. This has to be the most common way of getting 120VAC into a box, yet I can't find any chassis punches.

How do most people make a nice, clean hole for the C13?

Best Answer

I would make sure to check catalogues of Greenlee, Southwire, Klein, or whatever the major electrical distributers in your area are, as I've seen some oddly shaped and specialized knockout punches in the hands of data guys over the years. Greenlee definitely has rectangular KO tools. Failing that, you can certainly drill and file or use a rotary tool, but I would consider getting a sheet metal nibbler for anything up to 1/16" soft steel/iron. You can easily and accurately cut pretty much any square edged hole with one of these so they're great to have around.

I couldn't find a rectangular punch with that distinctive taper at the top, but I did find posts on a forum indicating a brand named Q-max may have sold them at one point. If you're operating in sufficient volume to make it worthwhile, you could likely have one made, or you could start ordering a version of the connector that fits a standard round or square hole.

If you're looking to acquire a decent hydraulic punch driver, now isn't a bad time. The recent advent of quick release battery powered KO tools has pushed a lot of perfectly functional hydraulic sets into the second hand market. Hope this helps.

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Electronic – Cutting and resoldering CPU chassis fan power cables

Your plan looks fine, although it is a good idea to cut, then strip. Cut staggered (see below).

Some suggestions:

Keep the exposed area as short as possible. 5-15mm (1/4 - 1/2 in) off each wire depending on how big your soldering iron tip is (and how confident you are!)
Tin both ends before join
Thread heatshrink on wires before join (if you're using heatshrink)
Clean iron often on wet sponge to get dry solder off the iron.
Feed solder onto joint while you heat with iron.
Stagger the soldered joints, for example, + is where the soldered joint is:

wire 1: -------+----------------------

wire 2: --------------+---------------

wire 3: ---------------------+--------

This will stop the joints from shorting on eachother if your insulation comes loose. It will also reduce the insulation thickness, since the thicker sections are staggered.

Insulation options:

Heatshrink: Three small gauge heatshrink pieces for each individual wire, one larger gauge over all of them together. This is really a nice and neat way of insulating.
Insulation tape: Small pieces of insulation tape to insulate them separately, then 1 bigger piece to insulate together over the top. You don't need a lot of tape, a little goes a long way.

Nice tutorial (with pictures): http://www.personal.psu.edu/djn5065/wires.html

Electrical – Testing a connection to a TCP socket through SIM5320A cellular module

About the easiest way to get a response from a server is to do a HEAD request.

For example, open a socket to www.stackexchange.com port 80

Then send:

HEAD /about HTTP/1.1
Host: www.stackexchange.com
(blank line)

You should get a response back, but just the headers, not the whole page.

Something like:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2016 22:44:11 GMT
Server: Apache

etc.

I have used this just to get the current time off the network.

Best Answer

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Electronic – Cutting and resoldering CPU chassis fan power cables

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